Intellectual Property Protection BEYOND OBSFUCATION
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Similarly, I studied .NET licensing classes last night, and it's not really clear just how I'll want to go about writing a licensing scheme -- whether to use file I/O classes. From what I see in the .Net SDK documentation, our license must be marked with a *.LIC extension.
The name of the file must be the fully qualified name, including the namespace, of the class with the file name extension .LIC. For example: Namespace1.Class1.LICThis is not the case for the NR license (.license), so the NR system must be proprietary. That's OK with me -- it may be a much better thing to do, because I find the VS .Net SDK documentation quite ambiguous too. For instance,The content of the license file should contain the following text string: "myClassName is a licensed component." myClassName is the fully qualified name of the class. For example: "Namespace1.Class1 is a licensed component."Personally, I read this stuff and ask myself what it can mean to anyone. I want to know how this string, "Namespace1.Class1 is a licensed component." is processed. You would suppose that if it is removed or altered that this invalidates the license, but how and why -- and what alternate processes take over then? By the time you have deciphered all the cryptic documentation an unexplained issues (by costly experimentation), you can have far too much time in a small bit of functionality. A crux of the design issues is splitting the design time behavior and runtime behavior of distributables. The documentation seems to suggest this happens, but not how. You return a validation value by overriding a method. Unfortunately, I don't see the path as being very clear here either. Like you, I most appreciate the fact that the NR licensing scheme will be hidden by a process beyond obsfucation -- and that is presently the deciding factor in the fork I'm going to take here, especially as I have now heard from Denis, and he's agreed to let me help him improve NR's documentation. My thinking is that I'll get my job done faster with more direct help, and that if we can improve the documentation, it may be very clear what to do with what my intuition tells me is the most promising way to distribute commercial .Net assemblies which require (or benefit from) intellectual property protection. I'll read your other posts now, but will report back in the next few days if I can, on what progress Denis and I have made with his documentation. This should be interesting. mYou should move this topic to a new Subject and see if anyone else can help you as well. I didn't know that there was a licencing method in the .Net SDK until you mentioned it. I wrote all my own code which, being obfuscated :) is good enough for my program and it's target market. I did find this interesting [^] which may assist you. There may even be sources available to you on codeproject! Good luck.
Glen Harvy
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You should move this topic to a new Subject and see if anyone else can help you as well. I didn't know that there was a licencing method in the .Net SDK until you mentioned it. I wrote all my own code which, being obfuscated :) is good enough for my program and it's target market. I did find this interesting [^] which may assist you. There may even be sources available to you on codeproject! Good luck.
Glen Harvy
Denis and I are working on this together now, but I'll look at your link in a second here.
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You should move this topic to a new Subject and see if anyone else can help you as well. I didn't know that there was a licencing method in the .Net SDK until you mentioned it. I wrote all my own code which, being obfuscated :) is good enough for my program and it's target market. I did find this interesting [^] which may assist you. There may even be sources available to you on codeproject! Good luck.
Glen Harvy
Hey, great article. He says, "While I believe that for completeness I should describe how you use LicFileLicenseProvider, I also believe that anyone serious about licensing their software will most likely avoid such a simple scheme in favor of their own, more creative schemes, one of which I'll introduce to you after describing LicFileLicenseProvider." I was pretty quickly convinced of as much last night as I explored the "documentation." THANKS A BUNCH!
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You should move this topic to a new Subject and see if anyone else can help you as well. I didn't know that there was a licencing method in the .Net SDK until you mentioned it. I wrote all my own code which, being obfuscated :) is good enough for my program and it's target market. I did find this interesting [^] which may assist you. There may even be sources available to you on codeproject! Good luck.
Glen Harvy
Denis and I are hashing out some ideas about licensing. Hopefully we will come up with a boilerplate which will solve issues right out of the box.